Cutting the cord for home Internet service can be tricky. / Ryan McVay Getty Images

by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

Question: I need a broadband Internet connection - no phone, no TV, just data - for my new home in Naples, Fla. What are my options?

Answer: This British reader arranging a trans-Atlantic move was considering Verizon Wireless' HomeFusion service. That residential broadband offering has decent speed, but she should have two other options free of the data caps that constrain HomeFusion. A little confusion may be understandable, though.

"VzW" launched this service in May of 2012 as a way to sell its 4G LTE wireless to homes where its parent company, Verizon, doesn't offer wired service. HomeFusion advertises download speeds from 5 to 12 megabits per second, with uploads running from 2 to 5 Mbps.

That's good - most digital-subscriber-line connections and some cable-modem links run slower. But even the pokiest DSL or cable doesn't come with the usage caps of HomeFusion.

The base $60 plan covers 10 gigabytes of use. Each extra gigabyte after a two-month grace period costs an extra $10, or you can step up to a $90 plan that covers 20 GB or pay $120 a month for 30 GB.

I've argued here before that clinging to an unlimited broadband plan is usually a waste on a smartphone. But the math flips around when 4G becomes the only access for every phone, tablet and computer at home.

Software updates alone are vastly larger on laptops and desktops - Apple's latest patch to Mac OS X tops out at 831 megabytes - and video services like Netflix can chew through 700 megabytes an hour, vs. under 200 MB per hour on a phone's smaller screen. That's a serious risk for people like this reader, who plan to rely on Internet video instead of paying for TV service.

Verizon publicists wouldn't break out how many HomeFusion subscribers had paid overages or which bandwidth allocations had proved most popular.

What else can this reader use? In the Naples area, CenturyLink provides DSL service, and Comcast offers cable access.

At one randomly picked downtown address, CenturyLink quoted $39.95 a month for Internet-only DSL at up to 3 Mbps; your ability to get that speed drops as you get farther from one of its "central office" neighborhood hubs. In the same ZIP code, Comcast's service starts at $29.99 (after an initial discount) for 3 Mbps downloads; for video streaming, a 25 Mbps, $49.99 service is the better choice.

If you don't know what access reaches a future abode, try consulting the broadband map maintained by the Federal Communications Commission. There, you can plug in a street address and get a list of the wired and wireless options available there, or you can browse the map to see what how broadband access varies across the United States by connection technology (cable, DSL, fiber, wireless and so on) and download and upload speeds.